


Gaoler To His Pity

by speakmefair



Category: Coriolanus - Shakespeare
Genre: Animal Sacrifice, Gen, Hubris, Roman Myths, Secret Name Of Rome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-14
Updated: 2014-05-14
Packaged: 2018-01-24 16:54:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1612424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cominius reflects.  And refuses to mourn his own failings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gaoler To His Pity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gileonnen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/gifts).



There was no need to be proud of him as a child, for he had pride enough for twenty, and Cominius had no time to spare on feeling pride in others, not then, not when he was young himself, and when he needed to gain so much of it from others for his own actions.

There was no pride to be felt later, for a young soldier barely old enough to serve as a _contubernalis_ , either. He did what was expected of him, and sometimes more, and Cominius certainly felt gratitude, on occasion, but there was never anything more than that available.

Never any time, never anything but instruction to spare.

He took instruction well, better than it could have been hoped for, in someone scarcely old enough to call a man but with too much sense of himself and what was owed to him, even as a boy, to let them call him anything but _Martius_.

Cominius suspected he would have laid a closer claim to the god than a mere naming, if he'd dared.

He did not seem to want to -- not that he lacked for bravery, or foolhardiness, for like all youth, he had more than his share of both -- but because, Cominius suspected, he valued his own truth more highly than the easy assumptions of others.

He might not have the time for pride in any of his men, but he occasionally had the luxury of observing, and that much, at least, he had seen.

The truth of his own nature meant more to Caius Martius than any plaudits, deserved or not.

But Cominius still felt gratitude, when that implacable conviction was his for the using.

He wondered sometimes if a better man than he could have seen that wanted or not, valued or not, a word or a gesture of the pride he should have made the time to acknowledge (for was not Martius of his making, as much as of his own will and the gods' decrees?) would have also made more than a little difference, in the years that lay ahead of them.

**

They told stories of him, before too long.

Some of them were befitting the young man Cominius was growing to know, the devoted soldier of Rome, the man who sought nothing for himself but a worthy battle.

Some of them -- were not.

It was Martius's flaw that he acknowledged neither.

It was Cominius's flaw that he thought that would be enough to keep that strange devotion, that half-unwitting purity, intact.

He was wrong.

He was wrong then as he would be years later, not to see that he should have spoken out, should have taken Martius aside, should have said _listen. Listen. Yes, they can say what they will, and it does not have to touch you. But listen to what is being said, pay attention, remember that while you might feel nothing, those who talk do not._

_Remember that not everyone is your second self._

If he had done that.

If he had only done that, then, when Martius was still young enough to hear him over the clamour of arms and the siren-song of victory, things might have been different.

He might even have spoken in time to stop that endless search for that same second self, the search he never even suspected was ongoing behind that millpool stillness.

**

Cominius never claimed to be an officer who commanded love. Respect was all he asked for as his bounden right, obedience to his orders the only thing he expected. With no time to feel pride in others, still less did he expect others to feel it for him, and he felt no envy when he saw them give it to Martius.

Why should he envy the bequeathing of a gift so unnoticed as to be almost despised?

Perhaps he could have taken Martius aside then, instead. 

Perhaps he could have said _listen. Listen. What they are giving you now, their acclaim, their claiming of you, that can prove false. No man gives his heart entire without expecting some return. And one day victory on the field will not be enough to hold those hearts or that love._

Perhaps he should have said _Rome is jealous. That is why she has a secret name. She is jealous even of herself, let alone those she loves._

But then had he reminded Martius of that, he would likely have cried out that secret name from the rostra, and called it worship; made sacrifices to that hidden deity and called it devotion.

Martius might not be the half-god the men who served under him cheerfully rumoured him to be, but he was, Cominius thought, at the very least god-touched.

_Dragon-born._

Such men always went their own way.

There was nothing, even then, that he could have done.

**

He should, perhaps, have known of that strange, unspoken search of Martius's soul for its mirror, long before.

But he never seemed to lack, or be in need. His marriage became something he spoke of with joy, when all assumed it would be another level of his strange sense of duty.

He brought that joy to battle, after, and they loved him for it all the more.

Perhaps it was then that he should have spoken. 

Perhaps it was then he should have said _listen. Listen. That joy comes from Tullia's lamp, it is for your marriage-bed and not your sword, it is not a flame to be lit anywhere else but behind the curtains of your sleeping-cubicle. Mars is no man's love, and the skin-quilts of his bed are no marriage-bower._

He could have spoken then, but he did not.

The flame of Martius's joy was too infectious, it caught all like tinder in its path; caught him, too, burning him through with a kind of exultant delight in the victories laid before him, for he was a general now, and not only a man, and he had no time to waste upon such considerations as a _right thought_ , when he was surrounded by right deeds.

Right deeds, and just victories, and still he did not speak.

**

He spoke too late, and he damned them all.

He gave Martius a new cognomen, one that would reflect his deeds.

He called him _Coriolanus_ , and never stopped to think that he had named the man, and not his victory; never paused, even for a moment, to consider that it was no praise at all, but only the sprinkling of spelt wheat upon the head of the sacrificial bull, before the hammer-stroke.

Never stopped to think that Martius, in accepting it, had fallen to his knees in consent of what must be done, and waited only for the knives to fall, and the blood to flow into the offering-cups.

**

Coriolanus was dead, and no man spoke of mourning him, nor even seemed to feel that due bequeathment.

If any man did mourn, it was the one who had killed him -- and he said nothing of what he might feel. He only waged war. Futile. It was a war of loss, not even attrition. Cominius understood it. 

He understood why that war continued, because -- because, once upon a time, so very many bitter, blood-soaked years ago, so many battles ago, he might have said, he might have said -- _listen. Listen. Your name will be remembered, and so you must become your name. Listen._

No. He could never have said that, not to Martius, could only now begin to form the words in his god-hewn heart, but he could still offer them up with the blood and the burning. Could offer up words for incense; offer up the unspoken for acrid smoke.

It was over, that dragon-fire that was not sparked from Tullia's lamp at all, but had instead been brought into sudden flame from something wilder and darker and older, something that Cominius did not wish to think upon too carefully. It was finished, in as much as it had ever been allowed to become at all.

And Rome was, still, a jealous mistress.

Cominius served her faithfully.

But sometimes –-

Sometimes he wished he had spoken, all those times he could have done so. Wished, with all of his broken heart, that he could have stopped the garlands of unwanted praise, the hymns of unneeded adoration, from being laid around (and upon, so heavily upon) shoulders that, after all, were never destined to be broken to any yoke.

Caius Martius Coriolanus.

Cominius's greatest success.

And his only failure.


End file.
